Welsh Castles Relay Results — Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

Hopefully to intercept various comments, questions, yes-buts, issues and limitations.

1. This website is very much a first attempt but all the data (in some form) 1983-2026 is in (except when the event was not held).
2. Person names are a nightmare to work with — nicknames, people who are David, Dave, Davey Boy, Dai, D, "Tiger" etc depending on the day of the week — yes they are in here.
3. Real duplicate names shared by a number of different people — if your surname is Davies, Williams, Jones, Smith etc and your first name is not Zaphod or Moonunit then you will have issues with other people who share your name — as you probably already know.
4. There are honest spelling mistakes and basic guesswork at what an illegible name is.
5. There are 101 ways of spelling a club name and people explore every one — I have tried to standardise.
6. Will it work on a phone? It's usable but better on a large screen.
7. Stage records! — yes I know — the main issue is that every time the results quote a different stage length then the course record alters, couldn't see a consistent and logically justifiable way around that. One way is for a committee of historical stage distances to meet and pontificate. A related issue to the variable nature of the stage lengths is that when running pace is displayed, this is based on the stage lengths that have not been measured by Jones Counter, at best they are Garmin GPS measurements.
8. "Why a database when we have scans?" I agree, let's abolish Google and look through scans of things.
9. "The website is very sparse, no dancing penguins, no enormous logos taking up 70% of the page" — intentionally so.
10. There is no WCR history page, social media etc — best to do that last really or you end up changing it over and over.
11. "Age categories seem to be all over the place" — Yes they are — three factors I considered, firstly there was a period of time when whether veterans started at 35 or 40 and for which sex changed with the weather — I don't know if we (and the team managers giving us the names) followed suit. Secondly in the scanned results there were a variety of ways this was recorded (or not). Thirdly basic omissions and errors of declaration, recording, input and scanning.
12. Irregular capitalisation — tried to deal with that with rules, problem being that names can be very arbitrary with capitalisation.
13. Stray weird characters, yes these are OCR artifacts, basically I will have to go through every stage of every year manually.
14. If a value is in green then clicking it will do something.
15. "Not great for people with Red/Green colourblindness" — I think that ship sailed in the 1970s or whenever the club vest was designed.
16. "Who are you and why have you done this?" - I am a Les Croupiers member, I appear in this database as a participant 8 times but was not running for Les Croupiers at the time, I hope this clarifies the first point, the second point is because I wanted to view the historic results properly and do them justice.